Van Gogh's starry skies, the comet Giotto set above the Nativity, Tintoretto's Milky Way and Dürer's star chart are among the twelve works on this list.
Stars return to the same places night after night, and comets leave dated reports, so a painted sky can be held up centuries later against the sky that was really there. Some of these works pass that test, and some were never meant to.
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How These Were Chosen
Of all landscapes, the night sky is the hardest to paint from life. The subject turns a little every hour, and its brightest points are too small to draw as anything but dots.
So the list leaves out night scenes that use stars only as decoration. Each work kept here shows a planet, a comet or the stars of a given night, or it was made to explain the heavens, as a chart, a record of observations or a myth.
Several of them do both at once. Their makers copied part of the real sky and arranged the rest to suit the picture.
12. Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, The Great Nebula in Orion (observed 1875 to 1876)
The Great Nebula in Orion is a cloud of glowing gas that hangs in the constellation of the hunter, just below the three stars of his belt. In this plate by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, it spreads like lit smoke among scattered stars, pale and ragged, without a single hard edge.
Trouvelot drew it in pastel, and it became Plate XV, the last of the fifteen plates of The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, published in New York in 1881 by Charles Scribner's Sons.
Each plate is a chromolithograph. The printer drew every color on its own slab of stone with a greasy crayon, then pressed the sheet onto the slabs one after another, so the print could copy a pastel almost tone for tone.
Trouvelot had come to astronomy late and from far away. He was a French artist who left his country after the coup d'état of 1851, when Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the future Emperor Napoleon III, seized power and silenced his opponents.
He settled in Medford, a town near Boston, and drew natural history subjects. Several auroras, the colored lights that ripple across northern skies, reportedly turned him toward the heavens in 1870, and he began drawing what he saw overhead.
Two years later Joseph Winlock, the director of the Harvard College Observatory, saw those drawings and invited him onto the staff. Working beside astronomers, Trouvelot began to date each picture by the night of the observation, the aurora of March 1, 1872, or Saturn on November 30, 1874.
The Orion nebula took longer than a night. It was a study spread across 1875 and 1876, and the medium suited the subject, since pastel lets a glow be rubbed and blended instead of drawn.
At a Glance
Artist: Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, French (1827 to 1895)
Made: Observed 1875 to 1876, published 1881
Medium: Pastel drawing, published as a chromolithograph
Size: 53 × 70.8 cm (21 × 28 in), printed plate
Where to see it: New York Public Library Digital Gallery (digitized plates), and a print collection at Princeton University Library
11. Paul César Helleu (concept), James Monroe Hewlett and Charles Basing (painters), The Celestial Ceiling of Grand Central Terminal (1913, repainted 1944 to 1945)
Gold stars and the figures of the constellations stretch across the Celestial Ceiling of Grand Central Terminal, the great railroad station of New York. The turquoise vault arches high above the Main Concourse, where travelers cross the floor below.
The French painter Paul César Helleu designed it in 1912 for Whitney Warren, the architect of the terminal.
The station opened on February 2, 1913. Within two months a traveler had looked up and reported that something in this sky was wrong.